R1b-M269 in the Bronze Age Levant

The new Harvard genotype datasets that I blogged about recently include a couple of potentially very useful samples from the Levant dated to 1400-1100 BCE. Search for IDs I2062 and I1934 in the anno files here. They're both from an archeological paper about a Late Bronze Age (LBA) burial site in what is now Israel that was published back in 2017 (see here).

Surprisingly, individual I2062 is

Armenians vs Georgians

Armenians and Georgians are ethnic groups that live side by side in the south Caucasus, or Transcaucasia. By all accounts, they've both been there since prehistoric times and they're very similar in terms of overall genetic structure.

However, they speak languages from totally unrelated families: Indo-European and Kartvelian, respectively. How did this happen and might the answer lie in the

Celtic probably not from the west

The term "Celtic from the west" is the catchphrase for a working theory, offered in a couple of recent books, positing that the earliest speakers of Celtic languages lived in Atlantic Europe during the Bronze Age or even earlier. It'll be interesting to see how this theory holds up against increasing numbers of ancient samples from attested early Celtic-speaking populations.

More popular and

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Not too many people have been buried sitting on wagons. The most famous case is that of an Early Bronze Age man who, considering his injuries, may have died in a high-speed crash - high-speed for its time anyway - on the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe.

It's likely that this guy was one of the very first wagon-drivers in human history, because his four-wheeled wooden model is dated

The Steppe Maykop enigma

Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they